The allegation that the Prophet Muhammad married Aisha in the year 624AD when she was only a nine-year old girl, is not new. However, the fact this controversy has surfaced on right-wing blogs, is something that has caught a lot of Muslims by surprise.

The controversy was sparked by a lecture in Toronto where the former Muslim,
Syrian-American Wafa Sultan claimed, “As a married man, Mohammed raped
Aisha when she was nine; he was fifty-four.”

Wafa Sultan’s depiction of Prophet Muhammad as a child rapist seems
to be a manifestation of her hatred of Muslims in general. She has no
evidence of any rape having taken place nor does she have a record of
Aisha’s age. However, what she does possess is a rage against her former
faith that she expresses with wild abandon. In her book, A God who
Hates, Wafa Sultan writes:

“Shouting has become their [Muslims’] hallmark and the main
characteristic they use when they engage in conversation with someone
whom they don’t agree with. Without it they have no sense of their own
worth or existence; without it they have no sense even of being alive.
... On top of shouting their way through a conversation, they have
acquired the habit of shrieking, and they take pleasure in hearing their
own shrieks. They believe that the louder they shriek, the more they
prove they are right. Their conversation consists of shouting, their
talk is a screech, and he who shouts loudest and screeches longest is,
they believe, the strongest. They fabricate disagreements so as to give
themselves an opportunity to shout. They seek contradiction so that they
can scream. ... Islam canonized the Muslims’ desert nature, and from
that moment on they were unable to acquire new ways of communicating
with others.”

Just as Muslim anti-Semites denigrate Jews by claiming the ‘yahood’
have an incorrigible evil nature (fitra), Wafa Sultan too applies a
similar diagnosis to describe the supposed unethical nature of the
Muslim. She writes:

“The first moral question a person learns is the difference
between the concepts of “yes” and “no”—in other words, the ability to
decide what to accept and what to reject. ... A Muslim lives his whole
life and dies without ever having learned this lesson. Islamic culture
has no clear concept of “yes” and “no.” The two opposites are confused
in a way that makes Muslims’ behaviour incomprehensible to others who
interact with them.”

After her Toronto speech, I protested her hateful language in an
op-ed for the National Post. I was not alone in finding fault with Wafa
Sultan’s logic or language. The Canadian Jewish Congress national
president, Mark Freiman reacting to Sultan’s speech at the synagogue,
told an Islamic conference in Toronto:

“...it is ironic that it was in a Jewish synagogue a short while
ago that an ex-Muslim made the sweeping allegation that Islam as a faith
was intrinsically incapable of political moderation or respecting the
norms of secular society. The Jewish speakers at the event spoke up
against this suggestion, but it is also appropriate tonight that I add
my name and that of the Canadian Jewish Congress to the rejection of
such irresponsible charges.”

Both Prof. Daniel Pipes and Avi Benlolo of the Friends of the Simon
Wiesenthal Centre too spoke against the main premise of Wafa Sultan’s
speech.

However, my critique of Wafa Sultan upset a lot of people. Dozens of
right-wing anti-Muslim blogs were up in arms, calling me a wolf in
sheep’s clothing and accusing me of defending child rape. It was if the
floodgates of hate had been opened. The Jewish Internet Defence Force,
reacting to my article, said:

“In reality, Islam is like a deadly, contagious disease. Once it
invades the mind of its victim, it is capable of transforming him to a
helpless pawn that has no choice but to execute what he is directed to
do. Of the reported 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, millions are
already trapped in the terminal stages of this affliction, while
millions of others are rapidly joining them. The people enslaved with
the extreme cases of Islamic mental disease are highly infectious. They
actively work to transmit the disease to others, while they themselves
engage in horrific acts of mayhem and violence to demonstrate their
unconditional obedience to the dictates of the Islamic cult.”

I also earned the ire of Dr. Andrew Bostom, author of The Legacy of
Jihad. Writing in Pajamas Media, Dr. Bostom took umbrage at my objection
to Wafa Sultan’s anti-Islam speech inside a synagogue. Accusing me of
Silencing the Jews, he claimed I was a bully, hateful and disingenuous.
In an email message to me, Dr. Bostom suggested I was, “a despicable
taqiyya-mongering pile of excrement.”

Another ex-Muslim, the author Ali Sina wrote on his website:

“Tarek Fatah proves my point that there is no such thing as
moderate Muslim ... Every “moderate” Muslim is a potential terrorist.
The belief in Islam is like a tank of gasoline. It looks innocuous,
until it meets the fire. For a “moderate” Muslim to become a murderous
jihadist, all it takes is a spark of faith.”

It seems all the Islam hating ex-Muslims were reading from the same
hymn book. Their mantra: A Muslim cannot be a “moderate Muslim,” unless
they renounce their faith.

Farzana Hassan, author of Islam, Women and the Challenges of Today,
who has faced her fair share of death threats at the hands of Islamists,
on learning about this controversy, asked the rhetorical question.
“Should a moderate Muslim simply become a lackey who accepts every
insult hurled their way?” She wrote:

“Moderate Muslims, reserve the right to defend any unwarranted
criticism of either the founder of Islam or the faith. This is not to
suggest that a great deal of the criticism is not justified. It is.
Moderate Muslims, without hesitation, and at great risk to our lives,
unequivocally condemn all atrocities committed in the name of Islam. We
continuously work toward eliminating gender inequalities among Muslims
including child marriages. Nonetheless, the charge against Mohammad as a
child molester, however, is unjustified for the following reason: His
relationship with Aisha was a loving relationship between two consenting
adults. It is more than likely that Aisha was closer to being nineteen
than nine at the time of marriage. This claim is supported by historical
data that puts Aisha at least 15 at the time, though it is likely she
was older.”

Islamists and Islam-haters: common cause

It is not just Islam-haters who have a stake in reaffirming the myth
that Muhammad had a child bride. The fact is that throughout Islamic
history, many a caliph and mulla has committed pedophilia and then
justified the act by invoking the supposed tradition of Muhammad in
consummating a marriage with a nine-year old girl. Even today in Saudi
Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Muslim girls have been
given away by their fathers, brothers or uncles to middle-aged men with
no sense of guilt or shame, since they are told their very own beloved
Prophet had sanctioned child marriage.

As far as men and women who consider Islam the enemy of human
civilization, the story of Muhammad and Aisha is one that can be trusted
to generate intense hatred towards the Muslim community. It does not
help that instead of denouncing child marriages, the Islamists and the
orthodox clergy of Islam continue to defend the practise as Islamically
permissible, legal and honourable. The fact that a four-year old girl
walks into Yemeni court asking for a divorce from her aging husband does
not awaken these supposedly holy men to the crime being committed in
the name of Islam. These men undoubtedly commit statutory rape when they
force themselves onto these children.

It is in the vested interest of both Islam-haters as well as
Islamists to continue to uphold the myth that Muhammad married a
nine-year old Aisha. To the former, it is the juiciest scandal with
which to deride Islam and Muslims, while for the Mullahs, it is a
license to sanction pedophilia and child rape for themselves and their
patrons.

How to find the truth

This begs the question: How do people like Wafa Sultan or the
Islamists claim to know for a fact that the age of Aisha was nine when
her marriage to Muhammad was consummated? There are no birth records
from the time and there is not a single piece of physical paper that can
be traced back to seventh century Arabia that mentions the age of
Aisha. In the absence of hard evidence, we have two choices:

1. We rely on medieval hearsay and gossip that has unfortunately seeped into Islamic literature, the Hadith and Sharia law, or;

2. We calculate the age of Aisha based on actual agreed-upon indisputable chronology of events.

While the Islamists and Wafa Sultan rely on medieval gossip, I have
chosen to make a rational estimate of Aisha’s age based on acknowledged
historical timelines.

Most medieval Islamic history books were written 200-300 years after
the advent of Islam and it is true that all of them state emphatically
that Aisha was only nine when she became Muhammad’s bride. However, all
of them rely on, and quote, one single individual as the source of this
information. His name was Hishām ibn Urwah, a prominent narrator of
sayings of the Prophet (the Hadith), who died in the year 756AD. He was
Aisha’s great-grand nephew, who first suggested that his great-grand
aunt was only nine-years old on the day of her wedding, 125 years after
the said event.

Prior to his utterance, a century after the fact, there is no mention
or reference to the age of Aisha. Hisham bin Urwah lived and taught in
Medina for 70 years, yet no one else—not even his famous pupil Malik
ibn Anas—-reported Aisha’s age. It is no coincidence that the growth of
harems of the Abbasid caliphs mushroomed to hundreds of wives and
concubines—many young girls—at the time the sharia law based on bin
Urwah’s report, legalized child marriage.

Instead of relying on the words of bin Urwah as so many Islam-haters
and Islamists do, I suggest we look at a few facts that prove that
Aisha’s age on the day of her wedding could not have been lower than 14
years of age.

Mathematical facts

The historian al-Tabari informs us in his treatise on Islamic history
that the father of Aisha, Abu Bakr had four children and all them were
born before the year 610AD, the year of the advent of Islam. If, as is
generally accepted, Aisha became Muhammad’s bride in the year 624AD,
then she had to be at least 14 years of age, if not older on the day of
her wedding.

Other calculations based on historical events place Aisha as old as
20 when she became a bride. Ibn Hisham, the historian, reports that
Aisha accepted Islam quite some time before Umar (the second caliph).
This means she must have been at least a young girl in the year 610.
Assuming she was five years old when Abu Bakr and his family converted
to Islam, the information puts the age of Aisha at 20 or more at the
time of her marriage with Muhammad was consummated in 624AD.

Furthermore, most Islamic historians agree that Asma, the elder
sister of Aisha, was ten years older than her. It is also reported that
Asma died in 683AD at the ripe age of 100. If this is true, then Asma
would have been 31 years old at the time of Aisha’s wedding with
Muhammad in 624 and the bride would have been 21.

Of course, these facts do not suit either the Islam-haters or the
Mullahs who sanction child marriage. Had the medieval caliphs or their
court appointed clerics in the 8th century accepted these timelines, it
would have taken away their right to fill their harems with young girls
of their choice.

My critics may argue that I am juggling the dates to validate my
thesis, but where is the evidence that suggests my timeline of
historical events is wrong? If the critics of Islam argue that there
needs to be a reformation in Islam, then why would we not err on the
side of an argument that could end child marriages in the Muslim world?
In the absence of any documentary evidence that Aisha was nine years old
when she became Muhammad’s bride, why cling to to the gossip of one
man, ibn Urwah, who served the courts of the caliphs. These were the
very people who trampled all over Islamic doctrine by governing as
hereditary kings and building empires on the backs of slaves.

Hate Blinds: Wafa Sultan

However, if one hates Islam and Muslims with the ferocity and
vengeance of Wafa Sultan, then it will be difficult for them to believe
that the relationship between Muhammad and Aisha was one of love and
adoration, not one between a rapist and his victim. There is little
evidence to suggest that any rape victim has ever fallen in love with
her rapist.

If one is consumed by the hate of Muslims, logic and reason is least
likely to influence someone like Wafa Sultan. She makes little secret of
the fact that she considers the world’s one and half billion Muslims as
people suffering from a disease that she wants to treat. Such is her
contempt for Muslims, as a physician, Sultan told a Jewish fundraiser
in LA that “I have 1.3 billion patients.” Her remarks were so offensive
that one of the attendees, Rabbi Stephen Stein later wrote in the LA
Times, he had to walk out of the fund raiser. Not only does she consider
all 1.3 billion Muslims as suffering from a disease that needs
treatment, her disdain for Muslims crosses all thresholds of rational
discussion. Demonstrating her contempt for Muslims, she rails in her
book:

“God placed donkeys and mules at Muslims’ disposal, while the West gave them mastery over new forms of transportation ...”

So deep is her hatred of her heritage, she suggests we Muslims were a
primitive peoples before the arrival of the Europeans and Americans.
She writes:

“Before oil was discovered in the Gulf states, Muslims lived in
primitive existence. Then, in the twinkling of an eye, the modern world
descended upon their campsites, disfigured their world with palaces,
high-rises, cars, and technology, and threatened the unchanging silence
of their environment. ...When people make an overnight transition from
the Stone Age to the age of the airplane and the Internet, it is
inevitable that they should undergo some kind of internal struggle in
the process, and find themselves subject to depression and other
psychological ills, specially when they continue to cling desperately to
the teachings and social structure of their former environment. Muslims
ran before they had learned to crawl, and tried to climb a ladder they
had not even reached.”

[Editor: this ignores the fact that most Muslims are not Arabs, and nor does Arab = Muslim. A fact lost on this self-hating Arab and Muslim hater!]

Zeroing in on her own Arab community, Sultan claims:

“When an Arab revokes his agreement he justifies himself by
insisting that he had never agreed in the first place, as he had not
said yes, but had merely smiled and nodded his head. This ambiguity
means that Muslims’ relationship with others are capricious and
uncertain, and this has made it hard for people to trust them. People
who cannot differentiate between yes and no and can express neither
unambiguously have a confused notion of concepts in general.”

I have lived in the Arab world and among Arabs for a decade. I admit,
there is much they can be criticized for. However, not even the Arabs’
worst enemy would accuse them of being uncultured or inhospitable. On
the contrary, one could argue the hospitality of the Arab is their
saving grace. Their poetry, their language and their generosity has
charmed the likes of Moshe Dayan and Amos Oz. Yet, so blinded is Wafa
Sultan with her hatred of the Arab, she told the Toronto Jewish Tribune
that it was only when she came to the USA that she learned to say “Thank
you” or “excuse me.” The Jewish Tribune quoted her as saying:

“I practised medicine for nine years in Syria. Believe it or not, I
learned how to say thank you [only] when I came to America. For the
first time. Because you have to thank Allah and Mohammed, nobody else. I
learned how to say please, how to say excuse me.”

Perhaps I as a Pakistani-Canadian could teach Wafa Sultan how to say,
“Shukran” (Thank you) or “Min Fadlaq” (please) or maybe her hatred of
the Arab has caused her to be deaf to these words, since they are the
two most oft-repeated words one hears in an Arab capital or village.
However, if her loathing for the Arab is couched in cultural disdain,
her contempt for the non-Arab Muslim is blatant. She does not consider
non-Arab Muslims to be true muslims. In her eyes, if the Arab is an
inferior being, the Pakistani is worse, not even worthy of the Islam she
hates.

Mehnaz M. Afridi is Professor of Judaism and Islam at the Antioch
University in Los Angeles. The Pakistani-American academic recounts a
talk at a Jewish Temple where she shared the head table with Wafa
Sultan. She told me, “I had the inopportune moment to present at a
Jewish Temple in Los Angeles with Wafa Al-Sultan. We were asked to show
similarities between Judaism and Islam, and I did. I was the first
presenter, she was second and gave a talk on how awful Islam was and how
I was not a real Muslim because I am South Asian [of Pakistani
descent]. Her beef with Indo-Pakistani Muslims was that we have
‘mangled’ the Islamic message to make it appear more positive.”

In her book, Wafa Sultan dismisses non-Arab Muslims, claiming, “a Christian born and brought up in Jordan is more Islamic in his behaviour and way of thinking than a Pakistani Muslim.”

“Then this provocative voice said something odd: ‘Only Arab
Muslims can read the Koran properly because you have to speak Arabic to
know what it means — you cannot translate it.’ Any translation is, by
definition, interpretation, and Arabic is no more difficult to
accurately translate than Hebrew. In fact, the Hebrew of the Bible poses
many more formidable translation problems than Arabic. Are Christians
and Jews who cannot read it ill-equipped to live by its meanings?”

If Wafa Sultan was against child marriage in medieval Islam, then
perhaps she should have also dealt with the institution of child
marriage in Jewish laws of the same period, since her speech was made in
a synagogue and her audience was primarily Jewish.

Wafa Sultan should also have considered the Talmudic Jewish
traditions on child marriage that too permitted child brides. Not being
an expert on Jewish law on child marriage, I had to rely on the Jewish
Encyclopedia. I also requested two rabbi friends of mine to help me with
this area: One expressed his regrets, saying he was not an expert in the
area, but my other friend acknowledged that although it is possible for
marriages to be arranged in childhood, but no physical contact can
happen before the age of 13.

The Jewish Encyclopedia had more details. According to it, rabbis
reckon “the age of maturity from the time when the first signs of
puberty appear, and estimated that these signs come, with women, about
the beginning of the thirteenth year, and about the beginning of the
fourteenth year with men. From this period one was regarded as an adult
and as responsible for one’s actions to the laws of the community. In
the case of females, the rabbinic law recognized several distinct
stages: those of the “ḳeṭannah,” from the age of three to the age of
twelve and one day; the “na’arah,” the six months following that period;
and the “bogeret,” from the expiration of these six months. In the case
of males, distinction was made in general only between the period
preceding the age of thirteen and one day and that following it,
although, as will be seen below, other stages were occasionally
recognized.”

A ketannah was completely subject to her father’s authority, and her
father could arrange a marriage for her, whether she agreed to it or
not; similarly her father could accept a divorce document (get) on her
behalf. If however the father was dead, or missing, the brothers of the
ketannah, collectively, had the right to arrange a marriage for her, as
had her mother. In the Talmud, there is inconclusive debate about
whether the na’arah should be treated like the ketannah in relation to
marriage, or whether she should have the freedom to marry as she wished,
like the bogeret.

In mediaeval times, cultural pressure within Jewish communities lead
to most girls being married while they were still children - before they
had become a bogeret. Boys too, were under cultural pressure; several
Talmudic rabbis urged that boys should be married as soon as they reach
the age of majority. Indeed, anyone unmarried after the age of twenty
was said to have been cursed by God; rabbinical courts frequently tried
to compel an individual to marry, if they had passed the age of twenty
without marriage. In the middle ages, many rabbis tried to abolish child
marriage altogether; this, however, was due to their distaste for
mi’un. Effectively, child marriage became nearly obsolete in Judaism; in
modern times, it is an extremely rare event, as most areas with large
Jewish communities have national laws against it.

Now, if it is okay for the Jewish community to abandon child marriage
despite evidence that it was permitted and practised in medieval times,
then why is the standard set differently for Muslims? Even if I were to
concede—and I do not—that Muhammad married a nine-year old, isn’t it
more important that we work—both Jew and Muslim—to end this practise?
However, it seems this does not fit the agenda of either the
Islam-haters or the Islamists.

Muslim Challenge

The Hollywood screenwriter and television producer Kamran Pasha (of
Sleeper Cell fame) who has authored a brilliant fictional novel about
the life of Aisha, Mother of the Believers, told me that in his research
for the book, he had concluded that Aisha was at least in her early
teens when she became Muhammad’s bride. However, he chose to confront
the critics head on. In the author’s note to his fascinating novel,
Pasha writes:

“In my novel, I have chosen to directly face the controversy over
Aisha’s age by using the most contentious account, that she was nine at
the time she consummated her wedding. The reason I have done this is to
show that it is foolish to project modern values on another time and
world. In a desert environment where life expectancy was extremely low,
early marriage was not a social issue—it was a matter of survival.”

As Islam hater pummel the Muslim community with insults and mockery,
our reaction feeds the hate. We burn books, threaten cartoonists or
make a laughing spectacle of ourselves for the rest of the world. We
simply refuse to indulge in retrospection and reflection. We refuse to
discard the ossified books of the Hadith that justify so much that is
wrong in the Islamic world and which contribute to so much shame and
embarssament.

Muslim scholars are caught in their own predicament. Most are willing
to concede that historical timelines suggest Aisha could not have been
aged nine when she became Muhammad’s bride. However, if they were to
admit this flaw in the Hadith books, they would be opening a pandoras
box. How many more laws of sharia, based on the hadith, are lies and
need to be discarded? In the academia too, few Muslim scholars wish to
be ostracized by the well-funded mosque establishment of North
America—the only likely place that could host a reformation in Islam.

Too much is at stake for the Islamic establishment to admit that
Prophet Muhammad was not the husband of a child bride. They would rather
see their leader mocked then to admit to the fallibility of the Hadith
literature. Until that happens, Islam-haters will continue to have a
field day. For the rest of us Muslims—moderate, liberal, secular or
progressive, call it what you may—the challenge is simple: Reatin the
Hadith literature for historical value as texts from our common history,
but no more than that. We need to detach ourselves from the man-made
laws and traditions of the medieval world and step into the 21st
century, like the rest of humanity, as believers in the strict
separation of religion and state and universal human rights where all
men and women are equal, irrespective of religion or race. If we don’t,
then we better be prepared to be be mocked with derision as stragglers
in the caravan who are slowing down the progress of all humanity.

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